Botchan does not hide his dislike of his pupils and of several of his colleagues who he coins nickname for such as Redshirt, the Clown, the Pumpkin, and The Badger. When Redshirt schemes to have Pumpkin transferred to another school Botchan allies with Pumpkin to get their revenge. Redshirt receives a pummelling after which Botchan decides it would be politic to resign his post and return to Tokyo.

The novel is divided into three parts. In the first part (Sensei and I the narrator is a young man who strikes up a friendship with an older man whom meets on a beach while on holiday near Kamakura. He calls the older man "Sensei", yet despite their friendship Sensei does not reveal much about his past to the narrator.

In the second part the narrator returns home but finds that his attachment to Sensei is such that he feels closer to him than to his parents. While at his home he receives a letter from Sensei and returns to Tokyo even though his father is dying.

In the third part of the novel (Sensei and his Testament) Sensei describes his past to his disciple in the letter he sent to him. He explains that he carries with him a deep sense of guilt over his treachery towards "K" and K's consequent suicide. With the Meiji emperor recently dead, and his most famous servant, General Nogi's loyal suicide, Sensei feels that his own generation's era is over and that he can best assuage his own sense of guilt by commiting suicide but begs his disciple not to reveal the real reason for his suicide to his wife, who was the motive behind his treachery...

"Perhaps you will not understand clearly why I am about to die, no more than I can fully understand why General Nogi killed himself. You and I belong to different eras, and so we think differently. There is nothing we can do to bridge the gap between us. Of course, it may be more correct to say that we are different simply because we are two separate human beings. At any rate, I have done my best in the above narrative to make you understand this strange person that is myself."

Kenji Miyazawa is ranked as one of the three leading modern Japanese poets.

Volume I of this two volume series two novellas:

• The Restaurant of Many Orders (Chumon no Ooi no Ryoriten)
• Night on the Galactic Railroad (Ginga Tetsudo no Yoru

• The Rope of Indora (Indora no Tsuna)
• Poran Square (Poran no Hiroba)
• Lilies of Gadorufu (Gadorufu no Yuri)
• Nighthawk Star (Yodaka no Hoshi)
• The Magnolia Tree (Magunoria no Ki)

• Matasaburo in the Wind (Kaze no Matasarubo)
• Otsuberu and the Elephant (Otsuberu to Zou )
• The Reishi Fungus (Saru no Koshikake)
• The Valley (Tani)
• Saikachi Abyss (Saikachibuchi)
• Yamanashi City (Yamanashi)
• Gauche the Cellist (Sero Hiki no Goushu)

First published in 1947, Shayou (or The Setting Sun in English) is a beautiful novel that charts the disintigration of an aristocratic family as a result of the social and economic upheavals of postwar Japan. The story is narrated by Kazuko, a woman who has recently turned 30 and who faces poverty and loneliness with the death of her mother and the suicide of her drug-addicted brother, Naoji who sees no place for himself in postwar Japan. Any reader of Dazai's biography will immediately recognise something of Dazai in the character of Naoji.

Kazuko responds to her situation with considerable spirit as she decides to pursue Uehara, a slovenly writer and drunkard, with the express aim of conceiving a child in defiance of the mores of her own class and of Japanese society as a whole.

The novel opens with a famous scene in which Kazuko's mother's unusual method of eating soup is described by Kazuko as a "flutter" of the spoon. This causes Kazuko to comment upon the true nature of the aristocracy. She recalls that her brother, Naoji, had said: "Just because a person has a title doesn't make him an aristocrat." Kazuko sees her mother's idiosyncracy and her self-possession as a confirmation of her true aristocratic spirit and concludes, in the excellent translation by Donald Keene: "The real things are apt to be deviant." ("Sasuga ni hon mono ha chigatta mono de aru.") Keene's words "apt to be deviant" are well chosen. Another translator may have written something like "The real things are different after all", which may be acceptable on a literal level, but lacks the depth of expression that Keene achieves by favouring the word "deviant" over "different". As the novel unfolds the causes of Naoji's deviance are revealed while Kazuko herself adopts an increasingly deviant strategy in the face of the crises into which the loss of her family and status present her with.

In his introduction to his translation of Shayou Keene writes:

"Kazuko, her mother, and her brother Naoji are typical not only of the aristocracy but of the large class of Japanese who were impoverished by the war and the succeeding inflation and land reforms."